Users today have access to and utilize a wide range of content that is electronically stored. For example, a user may access digital photos, songs, documents, applications, and so on. As the prevalence of this content increases, the amount of storage needed to store this content is also ever increasing. For example, the user may wish to store thousands of songs and pictures for later retrieval. The amount of storage required to save these thousands of songs and pictures may be quite significant, even to the point that the user does not have sufficient storage available on any one particular device to store the content. For example, the user may utilize a portable digital song player that has sufficient storage for a library having thousands of songs. The user may also wish to store a backup version of this library to a laptop computer. However, the laptop computer may not have sufficient available storage to store these songs with the other data already stored on the computer.
Additionally, the user may utilize a wide variety of computing devices during the course of a typical day. Continuing with the previous example, for instance, the user may listen to the portable digital song player while commuting to work, access a personal computer (PC) while at work, read email while at lunch using a wireless personal digital assistant (PDA), access the Internet while at home using the laptop, and so on. The content stored by the user, however, may be stored on different ones of these computing devices and therefore limit access of the user to the content to particular computing devices which actually stores the content. Additionally, as previously described, even if the user is willing to duplicate the content on each computing device, such duplication may not be possible. For example, the user may not be able to store the library of songs using the laptop computer due to insufficient storage of the laptop.
Therefore, there is a continuing need for improved storage techniques for content.